Crocodile Tears, Asylum gallery, April 2024
Crocodile Tears brings together a body of work created during the artist's time at the Dutch Art Institute. The works, spanning video, photography and sculpture, continues Smith's exploration of the boundaries between 'performance' and 'authenticity'. Central to the exhibition is the tear, a symbol of emotion and often considered as a marker of 'realness'. However the tears that flow here are shed from dry eyes, are a reflex to onions, are digitally rendered, or made from glass. Crocodile Tears invites us to instead consider the performativity of emotion.
As with much of Smith's work the relationship between the subject, the camera, and the audience is central. She continues to draw on her research tracing the camera's search for authenticity, and specifically what Laura Grinstaff termed The Money Shot: 'the moment when tears well up in a woman's eyes and her voice catches in sadness and pain'. Every subject in the exhibition is crying, while we watch on. Continuing her fascination with the socially expected roles we play in everyday life, Smith draws on familial relationships, lending the work an intimacy which is complicated by the presence of the camera.
At the heart of the exhibition lies Copycat (Ann Buchanan), one of two works from Smith's ongoing series Copycat, in which an image of a female subject is projected on top of the artist's grey skin, enacting a form of moi-peau; a double sided hide shared between Smith and her chosen muse. The eyes and the mouth become abject portals to the fleshy body beneath the digitised surface. In this Ann Buchanan edition, Smith is working with a film from Andy Warhol's infamous series Screen Tests; a seminal body of work which highlights the potential violence of image capture. Ann Buchanan faithfully executes Warhol's instructions to look at the camera without blinking, and consequently her eyes begin to tear up. Smith mimics this act, leading to an uncanny image where her tears trace the tracks of Buchanans. In Copycat (Kim Kardashian) Smith shadows Kardashian's emotional gestures. The repetition emphasises the performativity of the moment, and through mimicry she begins to undo her muse's subjecthood, reinforcing the drama of femininity that is at play.
In the back left hand corner of the room Crying with my Family is projected directly onto the wall, acting as a vibrant moving mural. In this performance to camera Smith is joined round the table with her family as they cut onions and cry together. Although the audience knows these tears are not 'real', this ritual still oscillates between an absurd gesture, and an intimate moment of vulnerability. A 35mm still from the other iteration of this work, Crying with Friends, is projected into another corner. The Da Vinci-esk set up, performed at their graduation from the Dutch Art Institute, acted as a non-verbal way for the graduating year to say goodbye to each other.
Near the centre of the room, spotlit on a stage, stands a rendition of the artist as a puppet. Whilst this work has been shown numerous times since 2016, the puppets' face now has the addition of glass tears, referencing Man Ray's photograph of the same name - a work described as either 'ridiculing female crocodile tears, or pouring scorn on the men who are taken in by such sentimentalism'. Crocodile Tears rejects this contempt for either the teary subject or the onlooker. It instead asks us to think about tears beyond being 'real' or 'fake'; as an abject fluid which breaches the boundary of the skin, allowing us to process somatically.
